Page 204 - Cultural Theory

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••• Reconceptualizing Representation and Identity •••

Spivak’s work, while having parallels with Trinh’s, comes to quite different
conclusions regarding the articulation of oppression by colonized women (see
Brooks, 1997a). Spivak in her now famous dictum, ‘The subaltern cannot speak’,
raises questions concerning ‘whether or not the possibility exists for any recovery of
a subaltern voice that is not a kind of essentialist fiction’ (Ashcroft et al., 1995: 8).
Spivak (1985a: 122, 129) claims that, ‘There is no space from where the subaltern
(sexed) subject can speak’, ‘The subject as female cannot be heard or read’. Spivak
derives her theoretical position from studying the ‘discourse of sati [widow sacrifice],
in which the Hindu patriarchal code converged with colonialism’s narrativization of
Indian culture to efface all traces of woman’s voice’ (Parry, 1995: 36).
Spivak, in taking this position, aligns her thinking with the work of Stuart Hall and
others in their recognition of the problem of attempting to define an ‘uncontami-
nated authenticity’ for the colonized subject. As Ashcroft shows: ‘Although she
expresses considerable sympathy for the project undertaken in contemporary histo-
riography to give voice to ‘the subaltern’ who has been written out of the record by
conventional historical accounts, Spivak raises grave doubts about its theoretical
legitimacy (Ashcroft et al., 1995: 8).
Spivak looks to ‘the postcolonial woman intellectual’ to ‘give the subaltern a voice
in history’ using a deconstructive approach. However, in examining the application
of Spivak’s model to a reading of Jean Rhys’s (1968) novel Wide Sargasso Sea, her
analysis does not appear to extend to the ‘native woman’. As Parry observes, while
‘Spivak does acknowledge that Wide Sargossa Sea is “a novel which rewrites a canon-
ical English text within the European novelistic tradition in the interests of the white
Creole rather than the native” (Spivak, 1985c: 253)’ (Parry, 1995: 36), she fails to con-
ceptualize Creole culture in terms of a cultural politics of location, as situated
between the discourses of English imperialism and black Jamaican culture. As Parry
notes: ‘her discussion does not pursue the text’s representations of a Creole culture
that is dependent on both yet singular, or its enunciations of a specific settler dis-
course, distinct from the texts of imperialism’ (ibid.).
Even when opportunities are available for the reframing of the subaltern in colo-
nial history: ‘Spivak’s deliberated deafness to the native voice’ results in her own writ-
ings severely restricting ‘the space in which the colonized can be written back into
history’ (ibid.). This is the case even when interventions are possible ‘through the
deconstructive strategies devised by the post-colonial intellectual’. One of the rea-
sons for this is the problematic nature of the concept of ‘post-colonial intellectual’
which Spivak recognizes as ‘implicated in the Europeanisation/hybridisation of all
culture in the aftermath of imperialism’ (Ashcroft, 1995: 10). This creates the same
conceptual and theoretical difficulties for Spivak as the use of the term ‘subaltern’.
The work of the postcolonial Indian theorist and writer Homi Bhabha, also writing
in the context of the United States, while sharing with Spivak, a desire to deconstruct
the unidirectional and univocality inherent in the work of postcolonial theorists
such as Franz Fanon, differs significantly from Spivak on the issue of the recoupera-
tion of the native voice. Parry (1995: 41) summarises Bhabha’s position as follows.
Bhabha maintains that whereas Said’s position as articulated in Orientalism (1978)

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